Academia Ghetto Thread

[Junkenstein]

I AM GOING TO BRAIN SCIENCE WITH SNAKES!!!

Newsfeed.

[Demolition Squid]

Congrats Nigel! 

[Reginald Ret]

Here's the summary I wrote tonight.
I am not at all sure  that I can finish the last two.

Sentence comprehension in autism: thinking in pictures with decreased functional connectivity

Rajesh K. Kana, Timothy A. Keller, Vladimir L. Cherkassky, Nany J. Minshew, and Marcel Adam Just

Article Summary: Previous research and first-hand of "thinking in pictures" led this research team to hypothesize uncerconnection of certain cortical areas important in linguistic processing. To test this hypothesis, Kana et al performed fMRI scans on 12 participants with autism (AS) and 13 typically-developing controls (TDC), while asking them to process either low-imagery questions (ie., questions that require little to no visualization in order to answer them) or high-imagery questions (ie., questions that require visualization, such as imagining the number 8 turned on its side, in order to answer them) which would require collaboration between the visuospatial and the linguistic processing systems in order to comprehend. The researchers hypothesized that:

1. The AS group would have lower connectivity between these two regions than the control group.
2. The AS group would show more activation in the parietal or occipital while processing low-imagery questions than the control group.
3. Key areas of the corpus collossum would be smaller in the AS group than in the control group.

The participants in the two groups were matched on the basis of age and IQ.
Baseline was assessed in a fixation condition in which participants fixated on an asterisk without performing a task. The fMRI was done using a 3-Tesla machine, and the questions were rear-projected onto a plastic screen seriously you don't care about these details, do you? It's Finals week. Now we talk about things I don't understand but can kind of visualize in a cartoon-like mockery, like sixteen adjacent oblique-axial slices acquired in an interleaved sequence. You realize we never covered interleaved sequences? It doesn't matter, you only had three hours of lecture to talk to us about these things. You're like a mother who died before she could tell her daughter about menstruation.

So this is where one of my classmates made a show in our study session of talking about how images were corrected for slice acquisition timing, motion-corrected, normalized to the Montreal Neurological Institute template, re-sampled to 2x2x2mm voxels and smoothed with an 8-mm Gaussian kernel, but I know as well as  you do that most likely the only words he understood in there are the same ones I do, "voxels" and "smoothed". OK, I understand motion correction as well.

Group analyses, I'll have you know, were performed using a random-effects model.

21 functional regions of interest were defined I don't care I don't care I don't care, including the medial frontal gyrus and (bilaterally) the inferior frontal gyrus and IFG2, middle frontal gyrus, intraparietal sulcus, superior parietal lobule, inferior parietal lobule, inferior temporal, inferior occipital gyrus, and middle occipital gyrus, and then there is some gibberish about being assigned wth reference to the parcellation of the MNI T1-weighted dataset. Is this related to the T1 protocol you spoke about in lecture? Because the way it's framed, it really doesn't sound like it, but I don't know what else to make of it.

There's also some shit about what sounds like maybe a Pagan wedding, what with the "union of four spheres". Maybe it's wizards. Hot polyamorous wizard love would be pretty cool to read about right now, maybe I should change my major to contemporary literature.

Anyway, the upshot is that they measured functional connectivity in both groups during the high-imagery and low-imagery tasks, using the aforementioned ROIs. Which might also be a euphemism for wizard love. The ROIs were grouped together according to lobe, because that helps us make sense of the data, right?

Results, ordered by hypothesis mentioned above:

1. Yep, more activation in parietal and occipital

2. Yes, mostly frontal-parietal

3. Pretty much yup



Questions & Critique:
I'm going to be blunt, and I hope you will take it in the spirit meant. I've just finished reading the fourth paper, as I warm up to summarize the third after a couple of read-throughs, and I feel a little like a first-year Spanish student asked to critique Pablo Neruda in his mother tongue. Multi-echo echo-planar imaging? Flip angle? 3mm isotopic? 64x64 matrix? Despiking? Temporal band-pass filtering? Linear and quadratic detrending? Linear registration? I'm not saying I didn't get the gist of the paper, or that I didn't understand the fundamentals of what they're measuring, and how they're measuring it – I do – but I am woefully underprepared to ask meaningful "big picture" questions when I barely speak the language, and I don't think that with even the best of lecturers, three hours is enough time for anyone, even someone with a solid biology background and some neuroscience and systems science classes under her belt, to learn more than the most rudimentary elements of this complex and highly specific language. It is presumptious of me, at the very least, to offer critique, and the questions I could ask might be less than meaningful. That said, I will make my best attempt.

1. One control and one AS group were female. I know this is an easy thing to pick on, but come on, what? At least first establish that there are no significant gender differences in brain connectivity in AS, maybe?

2. Is there any particular reason the authors repeat the same information over and over and over again in nearly identical phrases? Is it to meet some word length requirement?

3. I am definitely not going into behavioral neuroscience, give me cells and molecules any way. I feel like a geologist trapped in a geography lab.

Please tell me you sent it in like this!

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Here's the summary I wrote tonight.
I am not at all sure  that I can finish the last two.

Sentence comprehension in autism: thinking in pictures with decreased functional connectivity

Rajesh K. Kana, Timothy A. Keller, Vladimir L. Cherkassky, Nany J. Minshew, and Marcel Adam Just

Article Summary: Previous research and first-hand of "thinking in pictures" led this research team to hypothesize uncerconnection of certain cortical areas important in linguistic processing. To test this hypothesis, Kana et al performed fMRI scans on 12 participants with autism (AS) and 13 typically-developing controls (TDC), while asking them to process either low-imagery questions (ie., questions that require little to no visualization in order to answer them) or high-imagery questions (ie., questions that require visualization, such as imagining the number 8 turned on its side, in order to answer them) which would require collaboration between the visuospatial and the linguistic processing systems in order to comprehend. The researchers hypothesized that:

1. The AS group would have lower connectivity between these two regions than the control group.
2. The AS group would show more activation in the parietal or occipital while processing low-imagery questions than the control group.
3. Key areas of the corpus collossum would be smaller in the AS group than in the control group.

The participants in the two groups were matched on the basis of age and IQ.
Baseline was assessed in a fixation condition in which participants fixated on an asterisk without performing a task. The fMRI was done using a 3-Tesla machine, and the questions were rear-projected onto a plastic screen seriously you don't care about these details, do you? It's Finals week. Now we talk about things I don't understand but can kind of visualize in a cartoon-like mockery, like sixteen adjacent oblique-axial slices acquired in an interleaved sequence. You realize we never covered interleaved sequences? It doesn't matter, you only had three hours of lecture to talk to us about these things. You're like a mother who died before she could tell her daughter about menstruation.

So this is where one of my classmates made a show in our study session of talking about how images were corrected for slice acquisition timing, motion-corrected, normalized to the Montreal Neurological Institute template, re-sampled to 2x2x2mm voxels and smoothed with an 8-mm Gaussian kernel, but I know as well as  you do that most likely the only words he understood in there are the same ones I do, "voxels" and "smoothed". OK, I understand motion correction as well.

Group analyses, I'll have you know, were performed using a random-effects model.

21 functional regions of interest were defined I don't care I don't care I don't care, including the medial frontal gyrus and (bilaterally) the inferior frontal gyrus and IFG2, middle frontal gyrus, intraparietal sulcus, superior parietal lobule, inferior parietal lobule, inferior temporal, inferior occipital gyrus, and middle occipital gyrus, and then there is some gibberish about being assigned wth reference to the parcellation of the MNI T1-weighted dataset. Is this related to the T1 protocol you spoke about in lecture? Because the way it's framed, it really doesn't sound like it, but I don't know what else to make of it.

There's also some shit about what sounds like maybe a Pagan wedding, what with the "union of four spheres". Maybe it's wizards. Hot polyamorous wizard love would be pretty cool to read about right now, maybe I should change my major to contemporary literature.

Anyway, the upshot is that they measured functional connectivity in both groups during the high-imagery and low-imagery tasks, using the aforementioned ROIs. Which might also be a euphemism for wizard love. The ROIs were grouped together according to lobe, because that helps us make sense of the data, right?

Results, ordered by hypothesis mentioned above:

1. Yep, more activation in parietal and occipital

2. Yes, mostly frontal-parietal

3. Pretty much yup



Questions & Critique:
I'm going to be blunt, and I hope you will take it in the spirit meant. I've just finished reading the fourth paper, as I warm up to summarize the third after a couple of read-throughs, and I feel a little like a first-year Spanish student asked to critique Pablo Neruda in his mother tongue. Multi-echo echo-planar imaging? Flip angle? 3mm isotopic? 64x64 matrix? Despiking? Temporal band-pass filtering? Linear and quadratic detrending? Linear registration? I'm not saying I didn't get the gist of the paper, or that I didn't understand the fundamentals of what they're measuring, and how they're measuring it – I do – but I am woefully underprepared to ask meaningful "big picture" questions when I barely speak the language, and I don't think that with even the best of lecturers, three hours is enough time for anyone, even someone with a solid biology background and some neuroscience and systems science classes under her belt, to learn more than the most rudimentary elements of this complex and highly specific language. It is presumptious of me, at the very least, to offer critique, and the questions I could ask might be less than meaningful. That said, I will make my best attempt.

1. One control and one AS group were female. I know this is an easy thing to pick on, but come on, what? At least first establish that there are no significant gender differences in brain connectivity in AS, maybe?

2. Is there any particular reason the authors repeat the same information over and over and over again in nearly identical phrases? Is it to meet some word length requirement?

3. I am definitely not going into behavioral neuroscience, give me cells and molecules any way. I feel like a geologist trapped in a geography lab.

Please tell me you sent it in like this!

I took out the swear words, but yes.

'cause I am OVER IT. 

[Reginald Ret]

Here's the summary I wrote tonight.
I am not at all sure  that I can finish the last two.

Sentence comprehension in autism: thinking in pictures with decreased functional connectivity

Rajesh K. Kana, Timothy A. Keller, Vladimir L. Cherkassky, Nany J. Minshew, and Marcel Adam Just

Article Summary: Previous research and first-hand of "thinking in pictures" led this research team to hypothesize uncerconnection of certain cortical areas important in linguistic processing. To test this hypothesis, Kana et al performed fMRI scans on 12 participants with autism (AS) and 13 typically-developing controls (TDC), while asking them to process either low-imagery questions (ie., questions that require little to no visualization in order to answer them) or high-imagery questions (ie., questions that require visualization, such as imagining the number 8 turned on its side, in order to answer them) which would require collaboration between the visuospatial and the linguistic processing systems in order to comprehend. The researchers hypothesized that:

1. The AS group would have lower connectivity between these two regions than the control group.
2. The AS group would show more activation in the parietal or occipital while processing low-imagery questions than the control group.
3. Key areas of the corpus collossum would be smaller in the AS group than in the control group.

The participants in the two groups were matched on the basis of age and IQ.
Baseline was assessed in a fixation condition in which participants fixated on an asterisk without performing a task. The fMRI was done using a 3-Tesla machine, and the questions were rear-projected onto a plastic screen seriously you don't care about these details, do you? It's Finals week. Now we talk about things I don't understand but can kind of visualize in a cartoon-like mockery, like sixteen adjacent oblique-axial slices acquired in an interleaved sequence. You realize we never covered interleaved sequences? It doesn't matter, you only had three hours of lecture to talk to us about these things. You're like a mother who died before she could tell her daughter about menstruation.

So this is where one of my classmates made a show in our study session of talking about how images were corrected for slice acquisition timing, motion-corrected, normalized to the Montreal Neurological Institute template, re-sampled to 2x2x2mm voxels and smoothed with an 8-mm Gaussian kernel, but I know as well as  you do that most likely the only words he understood in there are the same ones I do, "voxels" and "smoothed". OK, I understand motion correction as well.

Group analyses, I'll have you know, were performed using a random-effects model.

21 functional regions of interest were defined I don't care I don't care I don't care, including the medial frontal gyrus and (bilaterally) the inferior frontal gyrus and IFG2, middle frontal gyrus, intraparietal sulcus, superior parietal lobule, inferior parietal lobule, inferior temporal, inferior occipital gyrus, and middle occipital gyrus, and then there is some gibberish about being assigned wth reference to the parcellation of the MNI T1-weighted dataset. Is this related to the T1 protocol you spoke about in lecture? Because the way it's framed, it really doesn't sound like it, but I don't know what else to make of it.

There's also some shit about what sounds like maybe a Pagan wedding, what with the "union of four spheres". Maybe it's wizards. Hot polyamorous wizard love would be pretty cool to read about right now, maybe I should change my major to contemporary literature.

Anyway, the upshot is that they measured functional connectivity in both groups during the high-imagery and low-imagery tasks, using the aforementioned ROIs. Which might also be a euphemism for wizard love. The ROIs were grouped together according to lobe, because that helps us make sense of the data, right?

Results, ordered by hypothesis mentioned above:

1. Yep, more activation in parietal and occipital

2. Yes, mostly frontal-parietal

3. Pretty much yup



Questions & Critique:
I'm going to be blunt, and I hope you will take it in the spirit meant. I've just finished reading the fourth paper, as I warm up to summarize the third after a couple of read-throughs, and I feel a little like a first-year Spanish student asked to critique Pablo Neruda in his mother tongue. Multi-echo echo-planar imaging? Flip angle? 3mm isotopic? 64x64 matrix? Despiking? Temporal band-pass filtering? Linear and quadratic detrending? Linear registration? I'm not saying I didn't get the gist of the paper, or that I didn't understand the fundamentals of what they're measuring, and how they're measuring it – I do – but I am woefully underprepared to ask meaningful "big picture" questions when I barely speak the language, and I don't think that with even the best of lecturers, three hours is enough time for anyone, even someone with a solid biology background and some neuroscience and systems science classes under her belt, to learn more than the most rudimentary elements of this complex and highly specific language. It is presumptious of me, at the very least, to offer critique, and the questions I could ask might be less than meaningful. That said, I will make my best attempt.

1. One control and one AS group were female. I know this is an easy thing to pick on, but come on, what? At least first establish that there are no significant gender differences in brain connectivity in AS, maybe?

2. Is there any particular reason the authors repeat the same information over and over and over again in nearly identical phrases? Is it to meet some word length requirement?

3. I am definitely not going into behavioral neuroscience, give me cells and molecules any way. I feel like a geologist trapped in a geography lab.

Please tell me you sent it in like this!

I took out the swear words, but yes.

'cause I am OVER IT. 

HAHAHA You, milady, are insane! Well done!

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Thank you! I figured that the worst-case scenario is, the damn thing is only worth two points, based mainly on whether it indicates that we read the paper.

Which I CLEARLY did.

[Cainad (dec.)]

It's not an internationally famous prestigious brain imaging lab. I feel a little weird turning down a spot in an internationally famous brain imaging science lab, with a scientist who won the Presidential Award, at one of the nation's most prominent and well-funded brain research facilities, in order to work in a completely obscure and underfunded basement lab full of snakes.

But for some reason, I am convinced that this is the right avenue for me.

Snakes are ALWAYS correct.

Something something Tree of Knowledge something, Eve something apple. Ya know?

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

It's not an internationally famous prestigious brain imaging lab. I feel a little weird turning down a spot in an internationally famous brain imaging science lab, with a scientist who won the Presidential Award, at one of the nation's most prominent and well-funded brain research facilities, in order to work in a completely obscure and underfunded basement lab full of snakes.

But for some reason, I am convinced that this is the right avenue for me.

Snakes are ALWAYS correct.

Something something Tree of Knowledge something, Eve something apple. Ya know?

GOOD POINT.

[Cain]

So...I got a distinction for my last essay.

Even though I handed it three days late, and had virtually no discussion regarding the definition of terrorism in regards to the topic at hand. 

My professor was actually slightly obnoxious in how much he praised the piece, the feedback was full of stuff like "excellent piece of work that answers the essay question in quite some detail and in an utterly convincing, thoughtful fashion by way of a high-level, critical and nuanced analysis" and "[list of case examples] all in one dense paragraph that alone drove home the point that you've done your homework, and a lot of background reading on top of that." and "your section on the Jewish Resistance is equally convincing – and equally well supported by interesting historical details as a basis for a high-level argumentation."[/list]

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

That's awesome! Your work deserves recognition.

[Cain]

Thanks.  I'm just kinda amazed that this is my best marked paper - that indeed, the professor in question had no criticisms beyond it being handed in late.  I thought it was...well, not a big bag of shit, but not so far off.  I definitely rushed elements of it, and the low word count made things even more difficult for dealing with the complexities of the issues - complexities I side-stepped in favour of going into the historical side more.

[Don Coyote]

I AM GOING TO BRAIN SCIENCE WITH SNAKES!!!

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I AM GOING TO BRAIN SCIENCE WITH SNAKES!!!

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I think I may have found my subfield.

http://www.academia.edu/5345332/Microbial_Genes_Brain_and_Behaviour_-_Epigenetic_Regulation_of_the_Gut-Brain_Axis

Research in this arena is sure to continue apace as I work on my PhD, opening significant space for investigating potential GE microbe therapies for mood and cognitive disorders, thus merging all of my interests.

[Reginald Ret]

I think I may have found my subfield.

http://www.academia.edu/5345332/Microbial_Genes_Brain_and_Behaviour_-_Epigenetic_Regulation_of_the_Gut-Brain_Axis

Research in this arena is sure to continue apace as I work on my PhD, opening significant space for investigating potential GE microbe therapies for mood and cognitive disorders, thus merging all of my interests.

downloading and pinting for later reading.
Now I'm registered for an academic site as an independent researcher!